As the South recovers from Hurricane Helene and prepares for Milton, a nonprofit medical supply company in New York, is getting ready to help with relief efforts.
WSHU’s Molly Ingram spoke with Danielle Butin, the founder of the Afya Foundation, about how they’ve helped divert perfectly good medical supplies from landfills for over 15 years.
WSHU: I want to start at the beginning. Tell me about your 2007 trip to Tanzania and how it inspired your company.
DB: So I had left an executive position in healthcare, and I went on vacation, and I really had no idea what would be next. And while I was in the Serengeti plains, it became very clear a woman was crying alone in a tent with a glass of wine in her hand, sobbing. And I walked up to her and said, what’s happening here? And are you okay? And she said I’m not okay. I am a women’s health doctor in London. I have come here to do medical mission work. There are no medical supplies anywhere. I’m watching children die, I know how to treat them, but I have nothing to help people recover.
And it was one of those moments, and we all have these moments, where you hear the story of another and you have this big compassionate response, but this was, you have to do something. You have to do something about this, not in a grand way, but in a very practical way, there has to be a solution here that I can take on. And I’d worked in health care my entire life, so I came home to New York, I walked uninvited through the waste management tunnels of the biggest and best hospitals of New York. Everyone is screaming, lady, what are you doing in our garbage? And I wasn’t in the blood-borne, contaminated garbage. I was in the laundry bins of, you know, still wrapped, sterile, not expired, IV solutions and IV starter kits.
And I asked the guys there what this was. And why is this here? And they said because, in the United States, we are the only nation that, if medical supplies are exposed to the patient, it has to be discarded in operating rooms, inpatient rooms, in ERs, you open a pack, you use two things, the rest has to be discarded. And this is a multi-billion dollar opportunity. This stuff should not be burned. When you look at the needs abroad, it is extraordinary. So, I named the work “Afya.” It means health in the Kiswahili language. It is my heart’s hat tip to the land that whispered the work. And that was the launch of Afya.